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June 2024
posted on 06.22.2024

The writing technique of placing short, blunt sentences side by side without conjunctions is called parataxis. Hemingway used it constantly:

He sat down. He drank his coffee. He looked at the rain.

The opposite is hypotaxis, which uses subordinate clauses to create complex, nested sentences. Parataxis creates a feeling of immediacy and flatness, like the narrator is just reporting what happened without interpreting it.

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